Coming up in October: THE DESIGNATED MOURNER by Wallace Shawn.

Recognize that name? He is probably best known for playing the guy in "The Princess Bride" who keeps saying "Inconceivable!" I first knew him for writing and acting in "My Dinner With Andre", an unconventional movie that broke all the rules but still became a hit. As Shawn has said in an article about himself in an article "Wallace Shawn: I wish people knew me as a radical playwright instead for 'The Princess Bride’".

The Designated Mourner is set in a country that seems like late-20th century USA, but the government is quite authoritarian and getting worse. (When I first read it, it seemed ahead of its time, but now it doesn't seem so far-fetched.) Howard, Judy and Jack are part of a liberal literary class which has been tolerated by the regime, but some political essays written by Howard decades earlier have come back to haunt him and his literary circle. Howard's daughter Judy sticks with him, but her husband Jack decides that he is not really a literary type after all, so he starts a process of disengaging himself from the group and re-inventing himself.

It's really great writing, and you probably haven't seen a play quite like this one before. It's funny and insightful, at both the political and the psychological level.

And the actors are fantastic - 

Matthew Stewart as Jack, Karalyn (Gulliver) Riepert as Judy, and Deighton Thomas as Howard.
The design team is Janice Johnston, Laura Sepulveda, Nancy van Dongen and Jenny Teplitski
Stage manager - Kathleen Sykora
Producer - Ashleigh Barney
Director - Jeff Culbert

Presented by AUSABLE THEATRE in association with LONDON COMMUNITY PLAYERS

Runs October 17th-27th (Thursdays through Sundays) at Procunier Hall in the Palace Theatre, 710 Dundas Street, London Ontario

Tickets and information: 

www.palacetheatre.ca or 519-432-1029.